Standard Belief Propagation Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) decoding and Layered Belief Propagation Low Density Parity Check decoding may be two algorithms used to perform low density parity checks, a form of forward error correction (FEC) on incoming data at, for example, a Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) in a satellite communications system. Standard Belief Propagation decoding (SBD) and Layered Belief Propagation Decoding (LBD) may belong to the message passing family of algorithms. In SBD, all of the variable nodes may be updated simultaneously using previously generated check-to-variable messages, and then all of the check nodes may be updated simultaneously using previously generated variable-to-check messages. In LBD, the nodes may be updated sequentially instead of simultaneously. Sequential updating may allow for the use of the most recent values in the calculation of the next node, which may result in faster convergence.
Since LBD may converge faster than the SBD, LBD may be preferred for high data rate communication. For low data rate communication, SBD may provide better error correction performance.